nder
touch of the exiled man whose life was more than half love, in the
marvellous Letters of Heroes' Sweethearts--in the complaint of Briseis
to Achilles, in the passionately sad appeal of Hermione to Orestes.
Whoever has not read these things does not know the extreme limit of
man's understanding of woman. Yet Horace, with little or nothing of such
tenderness, has outdone Ovid and Virgil in this later age.

He strolled through life, and all life was a play of which he became
the easy-going but unforgetful critic. There was something good-natured
even in his occasional outbursts of contempt and hatred for the things
and the people he did not like. There was something at once caressing
and good-humouredly sceptical in his way of addressing the gods,
something charitable in his attacks on all that was ridiculous,--men,
manners and fashions.

He strolled wherever he would, alone; in the market, looking at
everything and asking the price of what he saw, of vegetables and grain
and the like; in the Forum, or the Circus, at evening, when 'society'
was dining, and the poor people and slaves thronged the open places for
rest and air, and there he used to listen to the fortune-tellers, and
among them, no doubt, was that old hag, Canidia, immortalized in the
huge joke of his comic resentment. He goes home to sup on lupins and
fritters and leeks,--or says so,--though his stomach abhorred garlic;
and his three slaves--the fewest a man could have--wait on him as he
lies before the clean white marble table, leaning on his elbow. He does
not forget the household gods, and pours a few drops upon the cement
floor in libation to them, out of the little earthen saucer filled from
the slim-necked bottle of Campanian earthenware. Then to sleep, careless
of getting up early or late, just as he might feel, to stay at home and
read or write, or to wander about the city, or to play the favourite
left-handed game of ball in the Campus Marius before his bath and his
light midday meal.

With a little change here and there, it is the life of the idle
middle-class Italian today, which will always be much the same, let the
world wag and change as it will, with all its extravagances, its
fashions and its madnesses. Now and then he exclaims that there is no
average common sense left in the world, no half-way stopping-place
between extremes. One man wears his tunic to his heels, another is girt
up as if for a race; Rufillus smells of perfumery, Garg